Gravitational waves finally detected

Gravitational waves finally detected
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, caused when a massive object is accelerated. By the time they get here from distant astronomical objects, the waves have incredibly low energy and are phenomenally difficult to detect, which is why it’s taken a century to discover them since they were first predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Essentially every other prediction of GR has been found to be correct, but the existence of gravitational waves has been maddeningly difficult to prove directly.

Until now. And what caused the gravitational waves they detected at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is as amazing and mind-blowing as the waves themselves: They caught the death spiral and aftermath of two huge black holes 1.3 billion light-years from Earth, merging together in a titanic and catastrophically violent event.

Mind you, we’ve had some good evidence such binary black holes existed before this, but this new result pretty much proves they exist and that, over time, they eventually collide and merge. That’s huge.
The black holes merged to create a single black hole with a mass of 62 times that of the Sun. Some of that mass was converted into energy: the energy of the gravitational waves themselves. And the amount of energy is staggering: This single event released as much energy as the Sun does in 15 trillion years.

Amazing work and discovery...congrats to all involved in this project!

Paper:
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

Watch & learn:
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v3

Article:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/02/11/gravitational_waves_finally_detected_at_ligo.html

Animation:
computer simulation shows the collision of two black holes

#space   #gravitationalwaves   #LIGO   #generalrelativity